“I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you.
“All things that the Father has are Mine; therefore I said, that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you.” John 16:12 – 15.
What do you see in this passage? What questions do you have? How is this passage living in your life? How are these words of Jesus living in your local church? Your denomination? Your particular tradition?
This passage is a reminder that Jesus deeply desires to reveal Himself to us. He wants us to know Him, the Father, and the Holy Spirit intimately – He wants us to know the very koinonia of the Trinity; this is where chapters 13 – 16 are leading us, into the Holy of Holies of Chapter 17.
Sadly, most of us have the notion that God puts barriers between us and Him, when in fact Jesus came to break down all barriers, in fact He became sin for us so that we could become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21). When Jesus died on the Cross the veil of the Temple was rent in two, signifying that the way to God is now open to us all through Jesus Christ.
How do you view Jesus? Do you view Him as a God who is distant, or as one who is revealing Himself to you? Do you view the Father as an aloof parent, or as one who loves His children and enjoys being with them?
Do you view the Father as a parent who is reluctant to give to you? As a parent who thinks you never measure up? As someone who keeps raising the bar of approval?
Or do you see our heavenly Father as a parent who loves us with all of His heart and who embraces us every moment of every day…who yearns for us to know Him as He truly is, and not as He has been caricatured within much of Christianity? Do we not cry to Him, “Daddy! Father!” (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6).
If you have never truly called your heavenly Father “Abba” or “Daddy,” why not give it a try? I promise it won’t hurt you.
We can trust our Father that He will respond to us, we can trust our Lord Jesus that He will be with us, we can trust the Holy Spirit that He will speak to us. The essence of the Trinity (if we can use such language) is loving koinonia – this is to be our experience now in this life, and we anticipate its fulness yet to come in eternity.
Consider these words in our passage; guide, speak, disclose, glorify, take. What do they portray? They portray relationship, communication. We see the Holy Spirit guiding us, speaking to us, hearing from the Father and the Son, disclosing Jesus to us, glorifying Jesus.
Three times Jesus tells us that the Holy Spirit will disclose to us. The Holy Spirit will disclose things to come, and twice Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will take what belongs to Jesus and disclose these things to us. The coming of the Holy Spirit entails us living in a relationship with Him in which we experience a life of the continuous unveiling of Jesus Christ. Jesus is always the focus on the Holy Spirit in our lives, always, always, always.
Jesus says in Matthew 28:20 that He is always with us. When we arrive at John Chapter 17 we’ll see that we are called to live in the Trinity. Can we imagine a moment (if such imagination is possible) when communication in the Trinity ceases to be? When love and joy and delight and acceptance stop?
(Let me acknowledge Jesus’s cry, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” While we can touch, in some measure, the depth of this holy cry, because it occurs in the Holy of Holies, in the depths of the Trinity, behind the veil that then existed, we cannot not truly understand or comprehend it – we can only fall on our faces.)
John writes in his first letter that he wants the recipients of his letter to have koinonia with him and his brethren because John and his brethren have koinonia with the Father and the Son (1 John 1:3). In other words, to have fellowship with John and his friends is to have fellowship with the Trinity. This is not hubris from the Beloved Apostle, it is simply stating a fact of life.
If I am a member of a family, and I invite you to our family’s table, then you will experience (let us hope) the koinonia of our family. Since we will not talk politics, but since we will speak of Jesus, let us hope you have a refreshing time!
To know Jesus is to know the Father; and let us hope that to know the People of God, the Church, the Temple, the Bride of Christ…is to know Jesus. Of course, we can hardly know others if we don’t share life with them.
As we ponder John 16:12 – 15, let’s ask ourselves, “What do I see Jesus saying about our Way of Life, how we should be living, what we should be expecting?”
Are we seeing and hearing Jesus today? Is the Holy Spirit our breath of Life?
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